Interaction of the sun, the moon and our planet cause tides. In the Ross Sea the tidal cycle roughly repeats itself every 14 days. This oscillation can be approximated using ocean tide models. Yesterday we installed a GPS station on the floating part of the ice shelf to measure the tides and millimeters accuracy. This high accuracy is obtained by having a nearby GPS base station on rock and is necessary to interpret our satellite data. We want to observe a full neap-spring-neap tidal cycle and today marks the start.

Predicted tidal oscillation of the CATS ocean model